What are you looking for in a Church, and what do you see?
Perhaps it is a common struggle among spiritual progressive types to find themselves at odds with certain teachings of the faith tradition they call their own. When this happens, it can seem that the only tenable option is to leave the Church. But it is true that certain traditions get woven into the fabric of the soul in no small way, and simply leaving a Church is not always a viable option at all when it comes to holistically addressing one’s emotional and spiritual history, needs, and gifts for expression as they develop throughout one’s life.
People’s relationships to churches and Churches are intensely creative, personal, and not always what they seem. With devotion to some honest searching it may be possible to stay within a tradition that speaks your language even if you disagree with some of the pronouncements it makes.
Resources, energy, and luck permitting, it may even be possible to challenge the the church or tradition you love toward changing from within.
A friend forwarded me this recent installment in the New York Times Blog series “Happy Days: The Pursuit of What Matters in Troubled Times”: an essay by Michele Madigan Somerville called “Born Again in Brooklyn“. It beautifully describes Somerville’s emotional and political qualms regarding the Catholic Church, and the process by which she decided not to renounce it, but ended up returning in full force on her terms, as a feminist-progressive born-again radical Catholic. I say Hurrah!
Here’s an excerpt:
Roman Catholic, as it turned out, was the language my spirit already knew. Burning hyssop and frankincense, the stark and heart-charging splendor of Gregorian chant, Marian devotion; the iconography, the Latin Agnus Dei and Litany of the Saints, the Angelus bells, the rapture at the crux of Catholic worship have always held fierce sway with me.
As I started to experiment with religious observance, I quickly developed a sense of what I did and did not want. My aims were practical and ethereal, metaphysical and physical. I wanted to transcend, but as the mother of three toddlers, I wanted convenience, too. I craved beauty, musica sacra, social justice work, and maybe a whisper of ancient tongues in my ear, but I also needed a church that would embrace the realities of motherhood. If the celebrant of the mass glowered or gawked when I jammed the baby up my shirt to nurse at mass, he failed the audition and I never went back.
I liked parishes that were racially and socio-economically diverse, houses of worship that were beautiful, the presence of women priests when I was lucky enough to encounter it. I had zero tolerance for folk masses, anti-abortion diatribes, ecclesiastical greed, rote reciters of scripture and congregants who refused to sing. (After all, as St. Augustine said, “singing is twice praying.”) When people in the pews were unkind to my generally well-mannered children, I crossed their church off my list. I preferred my homilists witty, lyrical and learned. A brilliant theologian and Dante maven who used to celebrate mass a few mornings a week in my neighborhood helped hook and reel me in. Most of all it was another – a lyrical priest I successfully hectored and charmed into serving as my de facto guru – who presided over my rebirth as Catholic. And so I began to regularly attend Roman Catholic mass.
I highly recommend the rest of the essay, which can be found here: http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/27/born-again-in-brooklyn/
EDITED TO ADD a word on why this essay spoke to me so much: I have had ties to many churches so far in my life, but I currently have no formal ties to any religious tradition. I attended both Seventh-Day Adventist and Methodist churches with family members at different times during my childhood. I attended several different Christian schools growing up: a Presbyterian, a Lutheran, and a Catholic one. And in the course of my college years, I completed coursework for a religious studies minor (my favorites: classes about Christian and Jewish mysticism, a class about Buddhist philosophy, a sociology of religion class), was attuned as a Reiki practitioner, and completed a couple (extracurricular, but not particularly academic) meditation classes.
I guess that puts me, now as a twenty-something, squarely in the “spiritual but not religious” camp that’s so prevalent in the U.S. I do not see this status as necessarily lasting, however. I am still drawn to organized religion, and I could see myself at some point in my spiritual journey reinvigorating and developing my own relationship with a particular tradition and becoming officially religious once more.
Feel free to share words on your spiritual journey in and out of organized religions as a comment on this post!
Thanks for highlighting this well-written post by Somerville. Somehow, reading it made me think of the book TAKE THIS BREAD by Sara Miles, a progressive activist and lesbian who shocked her Bay-area friends by falling in love with an Episcopal church and finding herself organizing a food pantry there, coming in the process to a new understanding of what communion is. It’s powerful.
I enjoyed reading about Somerville’s concerns and process. I went through a similar process but came to a different conclusion in 1964. I have never regretted it. I now belong to a Unitarian Universalist congregation that embodies all that I wanted in a church including music, art, meditation,the feminine, inclusiveness of all. Love and support is always here. Our Senior minister was recently elected as president of National Unitarian Universalist in the US.
Thanks Nichola and Colleen for commenting. I edited my post to include a short synopsis of my journey between different traditions to where I am now — officially unaffiliated but open to finding a church/Church home once more in the future.
I invite readers to share their own spiritual/religious stories, like Colleen did, or recommendations for other relevant materials on the topic, like Nichola did.
I love TAKE THIS BREAD. It’s such a candid account of a courageous journey.
Interesting blog post. What would you say was the most common problem?
A man may lead a horse to the water, but he cannot make him drink.